When it comes to the Holocaust, we are hyper-aware but super-ignorant

A picture of a Nazi rally in Buckeberg.

We are a generation that is hyper-aware but super ignorant about the Holocaust.

I remember when I was studying for my master’s in Jewish history, my concentration was the Second Temple era, but the university insisted that our core curriculum include a course on Holocaust studies. It was not just my young age and naiveté that made me think that I already knew all there was to know about the Shoah. Sure, I didn’t know the exact names and details, but I thought that I kind of got it.

What was revelatory to me was not learning about things I didn’t know. It was learning about things I thought I knew.

Read the following questions to yourself, and see how much you really know:

How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust?

Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)

Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)

The stock answer that “everyone knows” is six million. But the real number is anywhere between five and seven million. And don’t think that six million is just a nice middle number between the two; that would be a travesty. If you say that six million Jews died when the actual number was seven million, you would condemn one million Jews to death twice – once during the Holocaust and once in Jewish memory. Saying that six million Jews died when the actual number was five million undermines the credibility of your historical claim by inflating the numbers.

The real answer is that we are not really sure how many Jews were killed, and the numbers given by the most esteemed scholars range between five and seven million. So, how did we get to six? The majority of scholars appear to have reached a compromise with that number, so it was adopted. But we really do not know.

How many names of victims do we know? When I was studying the Holocaust at the turn of the century, the number of names that we knew was just over three million. Since then, due to the opening up of archives, especially from former Eastern Bloc nations and the Internet, which allows people to fill out testimonies, the number has risen to just under five million.

The bottom line is that so many Jews simply disappeared, and we don’t even have a name to remember them by.

When did the Holocaust begin? Or end? Before you answer 1939-1945, does that mean Jews who were murdered on Kristallnacht in 1938 did not die in the Holocaust? What about Jews who were killed in the early 1930s before the Final Solution was discussed in Wannsee in 1942?

Did it really end in 1945? What about those Jews who went home to Kielce in 1946 after surviving the war and were massacred by their former neighbors, who were surprised that the Jews came back? Were they killed in the Holocaust? What about Primo Levi, who committed suicide in 1987? Did he, as Elie Wiesel said, “die in Auschwitz 40 years later”?

Let’s go for the lightning round!

• Where does the name “Nazi” come from?
• What does the term “Holocaust” mean? Is there a difference between the Holocaust and the Shoah?
• What does “genocide” mean? Who coined the term?
• Why was the specific term “Final Solution” used?
• What role did Himmler and Goering play?
• What’s the difference between a concentration camp and a death camp?
• What was the difference between the Jewish experience during the Holocaust and that of Hitler’s other victims?
• Why have ghettos? Why not just kill the Jews right away? Where does the term “ghetto” come from?
• How many Jews were gassed?
• Can you name any Jewish partisans besides the Bielski brothers?

THE POINT of these questions is to make us realize how little we know about subjects in the Holocaust that we talk about all the time.

But the real question is:

Why is Holocaust education so important?

Can you answer that to yourself in a satisfying way?

One thing that we need to realize is that these are literally the very last years that our youth can meet Holocaust survivors before they are gone. While there are still many child survivors, they were too young to remember much. They are still a great testament to the Holocaust, but the stories they tell about how they survived were told to them. For survivors today to be in a position to truly remember their experiences in a way that would allow them to give meaningful testimony, not just testament, they would have to have been not much younger than 10 years old in 1945. That would mean that the youngest are now in their 90s. There is not much time left.

Think back to how much you remember from your childhood, and even that is mostly reinforced by color photographs and home videos that allow you to strengthen those memories. There needs to be a real push to get as many of our children to meet and have conversations with as many of these survivors as possible. The model of the survivor standing in front of an audience is not going to be nearly as effective. If it’s just information and stories we need, we already have plenty of videos. During these last years, we need something much more substantive.

We need to have as many Jews as possible who will live to be 90 and be able to share with their grandchildren how they remember meeting actual survivors and having a relationship with them and who can say they saw with their own eyes the tattoo on the arm of an Auschwitz survivor. The problem, of course, is that now there aren’t enough survivors who match that category, but that should not stop us from trying to facilitate as many of these meetings as possible.

If you know a survivor who is willing to meet with some children and share his or her story, please make it happen. There is no word for “history” in Hebrew. The term used in modern Hebrew today is borrowed. Instead, we use the word zachor, which means “remember.” Let us create as many Shoah memories in children’s minds as possible.

In my opinion, it is the very best way for us to have a meaningful Yom Hashoah next week. в–

The writer has a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and teaches in post-high school yeshivot and midrashot in Jerusalem.